But Arthur gave no sign of fear or pain. His face exalted, rapt with vision. He lifted the sword high above his head.
The shrieking stopped. Lance drew a deep, shuddering breath. What should Arthur fear? With Excalibur in his hand, was he not as strong as the earth on which he stood? Could he not, if he wished, stretch out and encompass the whole night sky, and was not the moon, now rising full to the southeast, his protection and guide, promised to him in the forbidden rites of his childhood?
Lance lost the sense of his own interior, the sense of himself as a spirit marooned on an island of flesh. When Arthur spoke, it was as if he’d drawn the words from Lance’s own deepest soul. He spoke with the voice of the sea in the darkness to the east of him, the night-wind that stirred in the gorse. “Creature of earth,” he cried, and the worm went still, arrested at the moment of her final rush. “Creature of earth, return to your stone. Trouble the people of these lands no more.”
The worm raised her great head. She swayed it from side to side, as if considering obedience. Lance urged Balana forward. Whatever the outcome of this confrontation, he had to share Art’s fate. The lantern eyes glowed fiercely. The swaying intensified, and then the creature gaped, issued a frustrated hiss, and darted off sharp to the left.
She wound herself sunwise three times round the hill, and clasped it so hard that the very stone cried out. She squeezed, and the hill would forever retain the spiral grooves of her form. She howled, but there was no resisting the sword’s command—and anyway, now her rage was done, she wanted to obey. It was right to do so: she had somehow forgotten. She had been lost.
Unwinding herself from the hill, she shrank to half her size, and then a quarter, and then when there was just enough of her to fit, she slithered to the foot of the spindle of rock. Wearily she coiled her way up it, and rested her head on the top.
Lance and Arthur rode after her. They stopped the horses by the rock. Lance said uncertainly, “You could kill it now.”
Back in his skin, shaking with reaction, Arthur looked at him. “I thought it was… You were calling itshe.”
“I know. That makes it harder to kill, though. I’ll finish it off, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s all right. I must, I suppose. Well, you murderous brute,” he said without enthusiasm, “you deserve it, don’t you?” Two green eyes, still full of uncanny light, fixed on him unfathomably. “Why, Lance, look—it’s nothing but a snake!”
The snake shrank still further. The fires of its eyes went out. It became a worm indeed, a little turner of the soil no longer than Lance’s finger. The worm found a hole in the rock: formed a small circle around it. Touched its nose to the tip of its tail as if in salute, vanished into the hole and was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
A mile or so from the castle, they met with the search party Guy had sent out for them. “You little sod,” Guy yelled across the timber bridge, as soon as Art came within earshot. “I’ve been pacing the ramparts in this ball-shrinking gale for hours. Not to mention that I’ve had the ghost of poor Ector breathing hellfire down my neck all night for leaving you behind.”
He met the party in the light of the torches down by the gates, and seized Art in a half-savage bearhug as soon as he was down off his horse. It was the first time Guy had dared speak his father’s name to him. Art smiled in acknowledgement, pulling back to look into his brother’s tired face. “Well, he shouldn’t have. You did your best—you always have done. I’m hard to look after. It’s not your job anymore.”
Guy nodded. Eyes too bright, he turned to Lance. “Well, did you find your raiders?’
Lance looked at Arthur. A fledgling king couldn’t afford to tell a story of a dragon-hunt. If Art wished him to invent a battle, Anglian heads knocked together or hewed off, he’d do it. He knew how badly Art had wanted such a simple answer for the woes of the land, how set he’d been on finding it.
But Arthur shook his head. “No, Guy,” he said, and when the soldiers of the search party turned to stare and listen, went on unflinchingly, “It wasn’t Saxons who did this. We found nothing. I was wrong.”
***
Lance dismissed the groom who tried to take Balana from him. It was so much his habit to bed the horse down himself that he couldn’t rest until the job was done.
Even more of an obligation, after the uses he’d put her to today. He checked her limbs while she ate her hot mash, smiling over the old scars on her knees. Ector had been so incandescently furious…
Movement from the stable’s torchlit doorway caught his eye. Art must have taken the time to splash his face in the horse-trough, but other than that was just as their wild ride had left him, mud-spattered and weary and, to Lance, more beautiful than the dancing flames. “Ah,” he said. “The prince of White Meadows, rubbing down his own mount with a handful of straw.”
“I’m sure you’ve just done the same.”
“Yes. For the first time in years.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Injuries. Battle-fatigue. More than anything, half-arsed advice from counsellors who told me a king couldn’t act like a stablehand. Ector liked me to do it, though.”
Lance straightened up, leaning on Balana’s shoulder. “You should name that horse, you know.”
“I came to the same conclusion myself. I’ve called him Calonek, a name from the Cerniw and Breton tongues. It meansbrave.”
“Ector would have liked that, too.”
They stood in the warm hush of the stables, letting the words, with their load of pain and love, settle in the air. Art didn’t flinch or turn away. “Well,” Lance said eventually, “I’m glad you didn’t tell Guy we’d been off fighting raiders. But didn’t you want everyone to know you slew the dragon?”
